After the Carnage by Winch Tara June

Author:Winch, Tara June [Winch, Tara June]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2016-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

Meat House

In front of the Hagia Sophia the woman’s skirt billowed, the pleats of houndstooth becoming a momentary jellyfish bell, before the woman ran from the gust, flattening the fabric with her forearms, holding tight her modesty. Lane looked at him then: Luke was looking at the woman’s legs. He was always looking at women’s legs and then breasts, breasts that burst from small waists, small waists that led to long, lean legs – it was cyclical. It’s just men, it’s natural, everyone had said. But it had been the undoing of Lane, the surest nail that protruded from the coffin of them. Curiously, it was he who held the hammer, every day.

‘Nice legs?’ Lane enquired.

‘What the fuck, Lane! I was looking at the mosque!’

‘This is our HONEYMOON!’

‘I know it’s our honeymoon, my bank balance reminds me every fucking hour! What do you want from me? Do you want to break up? Do you want a divorce al-fucking-ready?’

‘Do you really remember our love? Do you love our love?’

He said, ‘Of course I do!’ Luke yelled it into the wind.

She yelled back, ‘I bleed for this, bleed my brains out! Every finger is a nozzle waiting to turn and drip blood.’

She didn’t really know what the hell she was talking about but couldn’t stop herself: ‘I’m a strung eel!’ ‘I’m the sun and the hangover!’ ‘I’m the market fish and you have gutted me, you’re gutting me, I’m gutted!’ When Lane said the bit about being gutted she punched herself in the stomach with both fists held together, and began crying. Some people came to their aid, or to tell them with shaken heads and tsk tsk tsk to please stop fighting in front of the children. He always blamed her, it was her problem – her imagination gone wild. He was looking at the place of religious worship? Not up the woman’s skirt? She knew him better; his place of worship was more carnal. He’d even become one of those men who dropped their sunglasses down their nose to stare; bare-eyed goggling was what he did, unabashedly at everyone but her.

Luke left, he told her he’d had enough of the hysterics, the life of:

Where are you going?

What are you doing?

What are you reading?

What are you thinking?

Who are you texting?

Who are you looking at?

He’d admitted the one transgression and it’d been ten months of fighting about the fact. They’d married hastily and come on honeymoon to try to paper maps over it all. He retrieved his backpack from the hotel room and left her there, sobbing at the dresser. She pictured him taking the taxi to the ferry and the ferry to another taxi and that taxi to the airport. The aircraft wheels leaving tarmac. Their lives now played in rewind through her mind.

Lane went to the Meat House restaurant opposite the hotel, the scene of most of their fights for the previous week. ‘Pretty lady, please come, sit, you want to eat some vegetables?’ The Meat House owner, Hamid, was fascinated to have a vegetarian as a new, temporary regular.

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